APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation
Authors: Pengyun Zhu, Qiheng Sun, Long Wen, Yanbo Wang, Yang Cao, Junxu Liu, Deyi Xiong, Jinfei Liu, +2 more
Organizations: Tianjin University · Zhejiang University · North University of China · Institute of Science Tokyo · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security
Abstract
Privacy policies are essential for users to understand how service providers handle their personal data. However, these documents are often long and complex, as well as filled with technobabble and legalese, causing users to unknowingly accept terms that may even contradict the law. While summarizing and interpreting these privacy policies is crucial, there is a lack of high-quality English parallel corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability. To address this issue, we introduce APPSI-139, a high-quality English privacy policy corpus meticulously annotated by domain experts, specifically designed for summarization and interpretation tasks. The corpus includes 139 English privacy policies, 15,692 rewritten parallel corpora, and 36,351 fine-grained annotation labels across 11 data practice categories. Concurrently, we propose TCSI-pp-V2, a hybrid privacy policy summarization and interpretation framework that employs an alternating training strategy and coordinates multiple expert modules to effectively balance computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that the hybrid summarization system built on APPSI-139 corpus and the TCSI-pp-V2 framework outperform large language models, such as GPT-4o and LLaMA-3-70B, in terms of readability and reliability. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/APPSI-139.
Automated analyses of privacy policies enable large-scale assessments of transparency in digital ecosystems, yet existing auditing pipelines remain predominantly English-centric. This limits their ability to systematically evaluate multilingual environments, as in the European Union, where many services disclose privacy practices only in local languages. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can extend privacy policy analysis beyond English without requiring language-specific adaptation, thus empowering large-scale auditing in linguistically diverse app ecosystems. We assemble an evaluation corpus spanning all 24 official EU languages from translated versions of two established expert-annotated datasets (OPP-115 and MAPP) and assess translation fidelity through automated metrics and targeted legal-expert review. Our LLM-based classifier for identifying categories of personal data collection achieves stable cross-lingual performance, with macro-F1 scores ranging between 0.91 and 0.94. We then leverage this capability in a large-scale audit of 2,611 Android applications from the Spanish Google Play Store. Combining multilingual privacy policy analysis with the evaluation of corresponding privacy labels and runtime network traffic exposes an important linguistic barrier: public-sector apps predominantly provide privacy policies in Spanish, whereas popular commercial apps mostly provide them in English. We reveal systematic discrepancies between declared and observed practices, especially in public-sector apps. Overall, our results indicate how English-only privacy audits can systematically obfuscate transparency gaps in multilingual environments.
The advent of LLMs has significantly changed the research on privacy policy and data compliance analysis by enabling tasks that previously required specialized, domain-specific tools. However, it remains unclear to what extent LLMs can truly replicate the diverse functionalities, and the wide range of methodologies and analysis offered by prior work. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of whether off-the-shelf LLMs can replace specialized privacy analysis tools. We study six representative tools spanning three major functionalities: contradiction detection, regulatory compliance analysis, and privacy policy summarization and aggregation, and across three intermediate tasks: structured data extraction using tuples, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) and manual privacy policy labeling. We compare the performance of two state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-5.2 and Gemini-2.5 in various configurations) against the tools by directly prompting the models to perform corresponding functionalities and tasks on a custom dataset of 10 privacy policies, allowing us to assess whether off-the-shelf models can produce tool-specific functionalities without further engineering or domain-specific training, major limitations in prior work. Our results show that LLMs consistently match or exceed the capabilities of existing tools across the functionalities. In manual labeling of first-party collection entities, LLMs achieved an average precision of 81.8% and recall of 70.9%, while for labeling of third-party sharing entities, they achieved an average precision of 91.4% and recall of 70.8% compared to the OPP-115 dataset. Overall, our findings indicate that LLMs can effectively perform a broad range of functionalities and tasks in privacy policy and regulation analysis that previously required specialized tools.
Reliable evaluation of large language model (LLM)-generated summaries remains an open challenge, particularly across heterogeneous domains and document lengths. We conduct a comprehensive meta-evaluation of 14 automatic summarization metrics and LLM-based evaluators across seven datasets spanning five domains, covering documents from short news articles to long scientific, governmental, and legal texts (2K-27K words) with over 1,500 human-annotated summaries. Our results show that traditional lexical overlap metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BLEU) exhibit weak or negative correlation with human judgments, while task-specific neural metrics and LLM-based evaluators achieve substantially higher alignment, especially for linguistic quality assessment. Leveraging these findings, we propose LLM-ReSum, a self-reflective summarization framework that integrates LLM-based evaluation and generation in a closed feedback loop without model finetuning. Across three domains, LLM-ReSum improves low-quality summaries by up to 33% in factual accuracy and 39% in coverage, with human evaluators preferring refined summaries in 89% of cases. We additionally introduce PatentSumEval, a new human-annotated benchmark for legal document summarization comprising 180 expert-evaluated summaries. All code and datasets will be released in GitHub.